Tom Chivers is the Telegraph's assistant comment editor. He writes mainly on science. Not a poet - that's the other Tom Chivers. Read older posts by Tom here.

Some people are on the pitch! They think it's all over! It is now, pending an appeal in the High Court!

The new home of West Ham United FC, or just the subject of several months' more tedious legal wrangling? (Photo: AP)

Do you remember how, in the 1980 FA Cup final, Trevor Brooking – later Sir Trevor Brooking QC – declared that Arsenal's offside trap prevented his players expressing themselves and was therefore illegal under freedom of speech law, thus giving his West Ham side a famous victory? Or how, in 1966, a team of West Ham lawyers – famously, Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and chief counsel Bobby Moore – led an English legal delegation to glorious victory over a highly fancied German brief, bringing the Three Lions the greatest moment in their history? And let's not forget the time that John Lyall, then general manager, helped the Hammers win the 1976 European Cup Winners' Cup on appeal in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Truly, West Ham are a storied team.

Those of you who follow football may have noticed that I'm being a little facetious here. But it is a sad fact of modern sport, and modern British football in particular, that some of the biggest victories and defeats nowadays come in the courtroom, not on the playing field.

The latest is a stinging blow to the Hammers. The club were to own the soon-to-be-complete Olympic stadium, having won a lengthy and bitter tender process in which Tottenham Hotspur fought them every step of the way. Now that deal has collapsed, apparently following an anonymous complaint about the process: West Ham may end up simply renting the stadium from the taxpayer, while a new tendering process is likely to take place, with Leyton Orient also keen to get their hands on the 80,000-seat venue.

It's an almighty mess, obviously: a huge embarrassment for the London Olympic planners, who have been fighting suggestions that the vast east London site will be a white elephant; an expensive defeat for West Ham United FC; probably false hope raised for Spurs and Orient, who will probably see the stadium end up in Hammers hands anyway; and the equivalent of chum in the water for hunting packs of sports lawyers, who are presumably circling even now to tear off chunks of flesh. But most of all, it's a damn nuisance for people who read the sports pages.

I'm a Liverpool fan (grew up in Oxford, so, obviously). For the last several years, reading court documents has been almost as important as reading match reports to determine how the club is doing. Are we going to be able to defend our 2005 Champions League win, despite finishing outside the top four league spots? Well, that all depends on your interpretation of Uefa Champions League Regulation 1.03! Will the club be bankrupted by debt incurred in the "leveraged buyout" by former owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett? Let's hear what Mr Justice Floyd of the High Court has to say on the subject!

It's not just Liverpool. Celtic are in the Uefa cup this season thanks to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. A year or so ago Chelsea were given a season-long ban on transfer activity following a "tapping up" row, later rescinded, again by the CAS. Manchester City want to tear up Carlos Tevez's contract after his recent hissy fit in Munich. Still with Tevez, his goals kept West Ham up at the expense of Sheffield United a few years ago: but was he illegally owned by a third party? You need a decent grounding in economics and the law to keep up with modern top-level football.

You don't turn to the back of the paper to read this, or at least I don't. When I pick up the sports section I'm actively trying to avoid reading about court cases and politics and economics, because I have to read about them all the rest of the time. I know it's unavoidable, in the multi-billion-pound world of European football: one place up or down in the league, one ball given over the line when it wasn't or offside decision wrongly given, can cost a club millions upon millions of pounds, and of course they'll sue. But it's sordid, and boring, and ugly. I know it's clichéd and antediluvian to go on about the Corinthian spirit, but some sense that there is more to sport than simply making money would be nice, every so often.

I wish I could suggest some solutions to football's money-caused problems: the American model of splitting TV money equally between all the teams in the league, for instance, might slow the runaway divide between the rich clubs and the poor ones; or the German model of club ownership, where 51 per cent must be owned by the fans, might prevent some of the more horrible mismanagement. But even if they might work (and it's not as if NHL players don't go on strike every couple of seasons), if anyone tried to introduce it here, they'd get the pants sued off them by every team in the Premier League, and that's all we'd read about for the next two years. Still, at least I can look forward to my team having its backside handed to it on Saturday by Manchester United. Hopefully that won't go to a tribunal or anything.